![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/Images\/Bates_Magazine\/2008-spring\/departments\/Farnsworth4531-1.jpg\")
\nRob Farnsworth smiles during a poetry reading and discussion convened by chaplain Bill Blaine-Wallace, part of a series exploring the role of passion and engagement. Chloe Viner \u201909 of Rowley, Mass., is at left. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.<\/strong><\/p>\n
The clich\u00e9 is effective, acknowledging his concern for process. But after the recuperative postponement, I have to ask Farnsworth if a student of his could effectively use such a clich\u00e9, straightforward and without irony, in a piece of fiction or poetry.<\/p>\n
No, he says, but then offers how a grad school professor at Columbia did once talk about rescuing clich\u00e9s \u201cby following them back to their literal roots. In some cases they can be excavated and played with. But that demands a willingness to play around in the sandpit that is the clich\u00e9.\u201d<\/p>\n
I smile; Farnsworth has reintroduced \u201csand\u201d in a way that\u2019s both sly and, importantly, instructive: the craft of writing isn\u2019t sandbox stuff.<\/p>\n
When I arrive in his Pettigrew office, the slightly flushed-with-fever Farnsworth is staring at his bookshelf as if trying to find a star in a suddenly jumbled sky. \u201cI\u2019m looking for a book,\u201d he says to the wall. \u201cI know what its spine looks like…but I long ago stopped trying to keep my books in alphabetical order.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now, most every professor has a well-used bookshelf, but you can easily imagine books leaving Farnsworth\u2019s shelves like blocks at the beginning of a Jenga game, for reading is the cornerstone habit that Farnsworth demands from his writing students. The apprentice writer must read \u201comnivorously,\u201d he says, because the motivation to write seriously should \u201ccome from wanting to participate in the spellcasting that reading makes you aware of. It should make you say, \u2018I want to add my voice to that. I want to sing along with that, descant with that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Craig Teicher \u201901 is one of two young-alum spellcasters and former Farnsworth prot\u00e9g\u00e9s who won first-book prizes in 2007. He received the Colorado Prize for Poetry for Brenda is in the Room and Other Poems, while Gabe Fried \u201996 won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Making the New Lamb Take.<\/p>\n
Both express an appreciation for Farnsworth that borders on wonderment. \u201cMy life as it is wouldn\u2019t exist except for Rob,\u201d says Fried, an editor at Persea Books in New York City.<\/p>\n
Teicher, also an editor in New York City (at Publishers Weekly, where he\u2019d just interviewed novelist Elizabeth Strout \u201977 about her new book, Olive Kitteridge), arrived at Bates trailing a belief in the communal and communional power of poetry. \u201cMy family bottomed out a bit in high school,\u201d he recalls. \u201cIn poetry I found companionship and something to identify with.\u201d Farnsworth, right from his first meeting with Teicher, noticed how \u201cearnest\u201d his student was about \u201cwhat poetry could do. He came with that inkling.\u201d Farnsworth says that he and others were merely \u201coperating the bellows\u201d to fan Teicher\u2019s creative flames.<\/p>\n
I share the bellows quote with Teicher, who e-mails me back: \u201cRob\u2019s being modest. He was my gatekeeper to the ways one could actually participate in literature.\u201d Later, on the phone, he explains. \u201cHere was a guy who, if I said something intelligent in class, was going to come back with something more intelligent that pushed the conversation further with other students, making it bigger and bigger.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll of a sudden, literature was personal and exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n
Farnsworth, who majored in English at\u00a0Brown and earned an M.F.A. at Columbia, teaches workshop courses in writing at Bates in addition to literature courses, including one on modern Irish poetry this past winter. \u201cRob isn\u2019t a Ph.D. scholar kind of guy,\u201d says Teicher. \u201cHe\u2019s a practicing reader and writer, and you\u2019re not going to find a guy who has, for example, an earthier, more intimate knowledge of 20th-century Irish poetry. He knows what\u2019s in the bones of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Widely published, Farnsworth is highly regarded in Maine for his many appearances as a poet, scholar, and facilitator for literary gatherings in small towns and cities.<\/p>\n
But there\u2019s more. Teicher and Fried especially praise the restraint in Farnsworth\u2019s mentorship. \u201cHe was really good about being cautious and making me aware how hard it is to have a successful career as a poet,\u201d Teicher says. \u201cRob understood that my college wish to be a poet was very much about my fantasy life, and he didn\u2019t want to be a creature in my fantasy life. Once I was older, and was an adult, he was excited about treating me like one.\u201d<\/p>\n
Says Fried, \u201cRob allowed us to explore our ambitions while making sure we could live with our shortcomings.\u201d<\/p>\n
Farnsworth reads and discusses his poetry www.fishousepoems.org<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rob Farnsworth has just won the Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":221,"featured_media":0,"parent":465,"menu_order":3,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_dimp_site_id":"","_dimp_override_contact":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"class_list":["post-468","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=468"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12945,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/468\/revisions\/12945"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}